Revision as of 03:50, 10 March 2009

Contents

Soft Matter Keywords

structure of liquids, X-ray scattering

Figure 1. (a) and (b) show two options for the arrangement of atoms in a 13-atom cluster. (a) is the cuboctahedral configuration (four triangles on a square base), while (b) is the icosahedral configuration (composed of 20 tetrahedra). (c) illustrates that five tetrahedra can be packed around a common edge (the red line), but will leave a gap of approximately 7 degrees.

Summary

Dr. Spaepen presents a short article on determining the structure of liquids and comments on recent work that has gotten closer to validating models with experimental data. He notes that to this point, attempts to describe liquids as disordered crystals have failed and describing them as dense gases is too complex. The favorite approach thus far has been to describe a liquid as a dense packing of tetrahedral building blocks. A persistent challenge for condensed matter physicists has been to find a simple structural description of liquids, akin to the periodicity of crystals and sparsity for gases. The liquid phase is now accepted as a well-defined phase, not merely a heavily defective crystal or a random assembly of micro-crystals, so work is on-going to characterize liquid structure.

Practical Application of Research

Understanding the structure of liquids in a detailed manner is necessary to see how defects allow the local shear flow that causes viscous flow and how the defects affect atomic diffusion. In addition, understanding the interface between a solid and its liquid melt will provide insight into nucleation and growth of crystals, which will prove valuable for industrial solidification processes, such as glass making.

Liquid Structure

In addition to providing a short introduction to motivate the study of liquid structure, this short article highlights recent work by Reichert et al. [1]